Dont Panic
Page 15
research, yes the pursuit of truth in all its forms, but
there comes a point I'm afraid where you begin to
suspect that if there's any real truth, it's that the
entire multi-dimensional infinity of the Universe is
almost cenainly being run by a bunch of maniacs.
And if it comes to a choice between spending
another ten million years finding that out, and on
the other hand just taking the money and running,
then I for one could do with the exercise.
- More white mice dialogue, cut from the TV series this time.
*****************************************************
Los Angeles was getting Douglas more and more depressed. He
began to feel he was losing touch with the very things that had
made him write what he did anyway. Eventually he decided to
leave.
"I didn't realise how much I hated LA until I left. Then the
floodgates opened, and everything came out. It wasn't a good
period for me, nor a productive period. I had a slight case of
`Farnham' - that's the feeling you get at 4.00 in the afternoon,
when you haven't got enough done. So there came a point when
we all decided to disagree, and I'd come back to the UK where I
felt more in touch, and try to get it right to my own satisfaction."
***************************************************************
TWO: What are you talking about, professional ethics?
VROOMFONDEL: Look, don't you mess with me about ethics. Let
me tell you that I have got three first class
degrees in Moral Sciences, Ethics, and Funher
Ethics, a PhD in A Lot Funher Ethics, and have
written three bestselling books on `Why Sex Is
Ethical', `Why More Sex Is Ethical' and `Five
Hundred and Seventy Three More Totally
Ethical Positions', so I know what I'm talking
about when I say that ethically that machine is a
write-off. Get rid of it.
- Unused dialogue from first radio series.
**************************************************************
Douglas returned to England, where he began to work once more
on the screenplay of the film, in addition to beginning work on So
Long, and Thanks for All the Fish and the Hitchhiker's computer
game.
At that time he told me, "What I'm trying to do with the film
is use a completely different selection process to that which went
into the TV series. We are trying to show the stuff you didn't see
in the 1'V series. So if you go back to the book, and find all the
things not in the TV series. . . that's the film!
"Also, a lot of the film comes to have a completely different
rationale. I've just put the scene with Marvin and the Battletank
into the film, from the second book."
18
Liff, and Other Places
*****************************************************
ZAPHOD: Soulianis and Rahm! Two ancient furnaces of light
that have warmed this dead and barren planet
through the countless millennia, guarding its
priceless secrets. Just looking at it makes me feel I
could really, you know really. . . write travelogues.
- Unused dialogue from first radio series script.
*****************************************************
Douglas Adams and John Lloyd have collaborated on a number of
projects. Some have already been mentioned. One, Dr Snuggles,
was an animated television series for which two episodes were
scripted by Adams and Lloyd. Dr Snuggles was "a cross between
Professor Branestawm and Dr Dolittle" and produced by a Dutch
television company for the international market.
One of their episodes apparently won them an award,
although neither of them has seen either the award or the series.
Dr Snuggles was essentially a children's series, and while the
Adams/Lloyd scripted episode I have seen (Dr Snuggles and the
Nervous River) was superior to the run of scripts for the series,
fans of Douglas Adams's or John Lloyd's work are missing
nothing if they haven't seen it. The plot, however, was science
fiction: Dr Snuggles meets a nervous river too scared to go down
to the sea because huge chunks of the sea are disappearing. After a
number of adventures, the Doctor goes off into space to discover
that the water is being taken by aliens who thought we didn't
want our water because we kept throwing rubbish into it. They
give the water back, Dr Snuggles ties it to the back of his
spaceship and returns to Earth.
Another project of theirs was rather better known in Britain,
but for some reason not a success in the US: a curious book
entitled The Meaning of Liff.
It began during the holiday in Corfu, which John and
Douglas had booked to write The Hitchhiker's Guide to the
Galaxy, but during which, for reasons already chronicled, only
Douglas wrote the book. They were sitting in a tavern, playing
charades and drinking retsina with a few friends. They had been
drinking retsina all afternoon, and after a while decided they
needed a game to play that did not require as much standing up.
Douglas remembered an English exercise he had been set at
school, fifteen years earlier, and suggested it as a game.
The rules were fairly simple: someone would say the name of
a town, and someone else would say what the word meant.
As John Lloyd explained, "It was a fantastically enjoyable
holiday. For a month we got drunk, and we'd stay up all night
playing these incredibly long games of charades.
"Then we began playing this placenames game. Near the end
of the holiday, I started writing them down, not having very much
else to do. By the end of the holiday, we had about twenty of these
things, some of the best ones in The Meaning of Liff, like `Ely'-
the first, tiniest inkling that something has gone terribly wrong.
"Many of them were to do with Greece, sitting in
wickerwork chairs and so on. And we kept doing them after the
holiday was over."
Douglas clarified the concept on a press release for The
Meaning of Liff:
"We rapidly discovered there were an awful lot of experiences, ideas
and situations that everybody knew and recognised, but which never got
properly identified simply because there wasn't a word for them. They
were all of the, `Do you ever have the situation where. . . ? or, `You know
what feeling you get when...?' `You know, I always thought it was just me...' All it takes is a word, and the thing is identified.
"The vaguely uncomfortable feeling you get from sitting in a seat
which is warm from somebody else's bottom is just as real a feeling as the
one you get when a rogue giant elephant charges out of the bush at you,
but hitherto only the latter has actually had a word for it. Now they both
have words. The first one is `shoeburyness', and the second, of course, is
`fear'.
"We started to collect more and more of these words and concepts
and began to realise what an arbitrarily selective work the Oxford English
Dictionary is. It simply doesn't recognise huge wodges of human
experience.<
br />
"Like, for instance, standing in the kitchen wondering what you
went in there for. Everybody does it, but because there isn't - or wasn't
- a word for it, everybody thinks it's something that only they do and
that they are therefore more stupid than other people. It is reassuring to
realise that everybody else is as stupid as you are and that all we are doing
when we are standing in the kitchen wondering what we came in here for
is `woking'."
Following John Lloyd's disappointment with the
Hitchhiker's book, he was similarly disappointed over a comedy
series he was meant to have been co-writing, To the Manor Born,
starring Penelope Keith. Instead he found himself producing a
BBC 2 satire show, Not the Nine O'Clock News, starring Pamela
Stephenson, Rowan Atkinson, Mel Smith and Griff Rhys Jones.
After a while Not the Nine O'Clock News became a major
success (which, according to Douglas, meant that John in his turn
spent a while being as obnoxious as Douglas had been in the early
days of the success of Hitchhiker's), and spawned a number of
records and books.
One of the books was the NOT 1982 calendar. Lloyd found
himself stuck for material to fill in space at the bottoms of some
pages, and at the tops of some pages, and in quite a few of the
middles, so he dug out 70 of the best definitions (he had
accumulated about 150) and inserted them into the book as
extracts from The Oxtail English Dictionary.
Faber and Faber, John's publisher, were very enthusiastic
about the definitions.
"They said, `This is the best idea in the whole calendar-
why don't you do it as a book? This time it was the reverse
situation: I hadn't expected Douglas to be very interested in
doing it as a book, so I expected to do it on my own. Then
Douglas said, `Let's do it together' and 1 said, `Yes!', I can't stand
doing things on my own, which is one reason why I'm a producer
and not a writer."
The Meaning of Liff was written in September 1982, in a
rented beach hut in Malibu. The two of them sat on the beach,
watched the ocean, drank beer, thumbed through a gazetteer, and
thought up definitions. Douglas also started learning to scuba
dive at this time. (He finished learning to scuba dive in Australia
two years later, and has a number of wise sayings on the subject
of sharks.) It was published in November 1983 by Pan (in a co-
publishing deal with Faber and Faber) in a remarkable format
(153mm by 82mm); a very small, very slim, very black book, with
a bright orange sticker on the cover that proclaimed, "This Book
lVill Change Your Life ! "
The `selling point summary' that went out to reps included:
"Small format for discreet consultation on retrieval from inside
pocket", "Authors expert in field" and "possible early quote from
John Cleese's psychoanalyst" as selling points.
On its release it went to number four in the Sunday Times
bestseller lists. However, overall it didn't do as well as a
Hitchhiker's book or, for that matter, a Not the Nine O'Clock
News book.
As Douglas said at the time, "Normally I don't enjoy writing
at all, but it was a real pleasure doing this book. But what's really
nice is that my family and so on, who say, `Yes dear, it's nice
about Hitchhiker's' - John's say the same about Not the Nine
O'Clock News - love this book. My kid brother and sister like
it.
"lt's selling briskly, but not as well as it could do. I think
that's because people have no idea what it is - it's totally
enigmatic and anonymous, unless you happen to recognise our
names. In both cases the product is more famous than the names
- but on the other hand it has terrific word-of-mouth.
"But I enjoy it. I can reread it, whereas normally I cringe
when I read my stuff."
The Meaning of Liff also kicked off a minor controversy in
the newspapers. Although it was well, and extensively, reviewed
(primarily because it was so easily quotable - despite the
presence of the word `Ripon', described in The Meaning of Liff
as: `[of literary critics] To include all the best jokes from the book
in the review to make it look as if the critic had thought of them'),
there were also accusations of plagiarism.
Having just undergone a traumatic time trying to get a
certain advertising agency to pay up for having stolen the idea for
an ad campaign using the phrase The Oxtail English Dictionary
(see `Cannock Chase' in The Meaning of Liff), Adams and Lloyd
were rather put out when it was widely pointed out that the idea
had originated in an essay written by Paul Jennings, called Ware,
Wye and Watford published in the late 1950s.
Douglas suggested that the teacher who gave him the exercise
had probably got the idea from the Jennings book, and sent
Jennings a note of apology.
(Miles Kington in The Times rushed to Adams's and Lloyd's
defence, pointing out the essential difference between the two: that
while Jennings had been primarily interested in the sound and
flavour of the placename [he suggested that `Rickmansworth'- as
in `a small cafe in. . .' - was really the nominal rent paid to the
Lord of the Manor for hay; it sounds right, but isn't particularly
funny], Lloyd-Adams had been far more concerned in amassing
meanings for which there were no words previously in existence,
the actual word or placename they picked being less than
important.)
An additional coincidence (although certain devoted fans
have woven intricate conspiracy theories around it) was its release
at almost exactly the same time as the Monty Python film, The
Meaning of Life. The film's title sequence shows the title, carved,
in classically modest Terry Gilliam fashion, out of huge slabs of
rock; a lightning bolt removes the bottom bar of the E, turning it
into an F - The Meaning of Liff. It was a meaningless
coincidence, discovered by Douglas and Terry Jones slightly
before the release of either of their products, but too late for
anything to be changed. It was a coincidence but if you wish to
concoct conspiracy theories (and what does happen in the forty-
second minute of the film?) then go right ahead.
Although The Meaning of Liff was published in the US in a
different format and with some extra words, it is the least known
of Douglas's books there.
"I did some college readings in America. You would think
that a high concentration of people who knew what I had written
would be in those audiences, yet hardly anybody there had heard
of The Meaning of Liff. I read sections, and they went over well.
People kept asking me where they could find the book. No one
could find it. I think it suffered from nobody knowing what to do
with it. "
`Liff', incidentally, is a town in Scotland. Its meaning? A
book, the contents of which are totally belied by its cover. For
instance, any book the dust jacket of which bears the words,
"This book will ch
ange your life! ".
Postscript: Adams and Lloyd, assisted by Stephen Fry, returned to Liff in their
work for The Utterly Utterly Merry Comic Relief Christmas Book, co-edited by
Douglas Adams, and in 1990 an expanded version, The Deeper Meaning of Liff,
was published.
19
SLATFAT Fish
*************************************************************
CUT TO A BLURRY CLOSE-UP OF ZAPHOD
LYING ASLEEP ON THE GROUND.
FORD: Zaphod! Wake up!
ZAPHOD: Mmmmmmmwwerrrr?
TRILLIAN: Hey come on, wake up.
SLOWLY THE PICTURE FOCUSSES.
ZAPHOD: Just let me stick to what I'm good at, yeah?
HE GOES BACK TO SLEEP.
FORD: You want me to kick you?
2APHOD: Would it give you a lot of pleasure?
FORD: No.
ZAPHOD: Nor me. So what's the point? Stop bugging me.
TRILLIAN: He got a double dose of the gas. Two windpipes.
ZAPHOD: Hey, lose the talk, will you? It's hard enough trying
to sleep anyway. What's the matter with the
ground? It's all cold and hard.
FORD: It's gold.
PULL BACK RAPIDLY AS ZAPHOD LEAPS
TO HIS FEET.
WE SEE THAT THEY APPEAR TO BE
STANDING ON A VAST SHINING PLAIN OF
SOLID GOLD.
ZAPHOD: Hey, who put all that there?
FORD: It's nothing.
ZAPHOD: Nothing? Gold by the square mile nothing?
TRILLIAN: This world is an illusion.
ZAPHOD: You pick now to become Buddhists?
FORD: It's just a catalogue.
ZAPHOD: A who ?
FORD: A catalogue. It's not real. Just a projection.
ZAPHOD: How can you say that?
HE DROPS TO HIS KNEES AND STARTS
FEELING THE "GROUND".
TRILLIAN: We both came round a while ago. We shouted and
yelled till somebody came. . .
FORD: And then carried on shouting and yelling till they
put us in their planet catalogue. They said they'd
deal with us later. This is all Sens-O-Tape.
HE POINTS UP INTO THE SKY.
WE SEE THERE ARE SOME WORDS. THEY
SAY:
"MAGRATHEAN PLANET CATALOGUE. BK
THREE.
DESIGN 35/C/6b.
`ULTRASULTAN'S ECSTASY'.
LANDFORMATION: GOLD.
OPTIONAL EXTRAS: SILVER MOON,